Medical Tourism

According to Medical Travel Quality Alliance, one of the early predictions of global revenue for medical tourism, $100 billion by 2012, actually included wellness seekers and many others who we today may not strictly classify as medical travelers seeking acute care. Recent reports focus more on numbers of people who might travel (up to 700,000 patients a year) and the savings they would create for the home healthcare system ($20 billion) by taking treatment abroad. There is still no agreed upon universal methodology for data collection let alone an agreed upon definition of medical tourist. Each special interest group records its data differently to bolster its own argument of exponential growth, galloping growth or just growth. Each country’s tourism bureau counts medical tourists in ways to justify their budget increases for the promotion of medical tourism.  In Mexico, anyone crossing the border to purchase prescription drugs is still counted as a medical tourist. In Thailand, a patient who visits a lab, gets medication, has a chest x-ray, has a mammogram, takes a stress test, consults with a general practitioner and a surgeon, and then is admitted as an inpatient used to be counted as 8 medical tourists. Dr Mohamad Nasir Zahari, Medical Director Beverly Wilshire Medical Centre talks about Medical Tourism.